::sigh:: Reddit. So easily blinded by (pseudo-)science.

People are claiming that MTGox still "has" a bunch of coin. In the near complete absence of information, maybe they do. Maybe they loaded them onto a ship that was destroyed by a tsunami and there is now a sunken MTGox chest of bitcoins. Maybe. Maybe the ship was really a space ship and they're all planning to escape To The Moon. Who the heck knows? I sure don't.

What people are doing is loading up a famous 424k BTC transaction MTGox made in 2011. (Or at later 550k BTC transaction for which I'm aware of no solid evidence belonged at the time to MTGox— Just some speculation by Dooglus) and then clicking around on the movement of funds until they find an address with a large amount of coin available to it.

The problem is that you would expect a large portion of all withdraws from MTGox to be linked in such a manner and certainly all very high value ones. Once you've gone even one hop you cannot be sure that the coins are controlled by MTGox anymore. The alternative hypotheses that these were large manual withdraws to big purchasers is equally supported by the data.

A significant fraction of all circulating coins are "linked" to MTGox— but this doesn't mean that MTGox currently controls them.

Other people are pointing to the constant spamming of dust that most addresses which have received large transactions receive, claiming that the same third party paying them proves they are somehow linked. Sorry, it doesn't work that way. If it were so, them I am really MTGox, DPR, Satoshi, and everyone else that has ever received Bitcoin spam (cue mystery music).

I understand that people want to find reason to hope— I do too. I also understand that people are eager to drive up the value of their Goxcoin on BitcoinBuilder. But the information I'm seeing posted on reddit is simply not good science.

If someone starts flooding you with BC.i links without clear explanations as "proof" you should be imagining a crazy eyed conspiracy theorist in a movie: cutting out random pictures from the news paper, pasting them to the wall, and stringing twine all around them like some mystical ritual. With enough guesses some are bound to be right, but that doesn't mean that their output isn't pure noise. THEY'RE ALL LINKED!! DON'T YOU SEE!!! WE'RE BEING WATCHED!

Actual evidence would be things like the claimed address-with-coins was a signer on a transaction that we know was created by MTGox (And even this only because we can be relatively confident that MTGox didn't coinjoin). Less strong evidence might be an address which paid a huge amount of coins to a known MTGox address— though it still could have been a deposit. No linkage evidence holds up by more than one transaction hop, however, because the coins could change ownership in every hop.

Anyone claiming to show MTGox coin ownership should be able to clearly explain why their evidence shows MTGox holds the coin and how the evidence excludes alternative hypothesis like the coins were withdrawn from MTGox.

Also keep in mind that the 'leaked' crisis plan document can be argued to be claiming that MTGox itself has 120k of its own Bitcoins— there is some ambiguity about it being listed with reversed sign in the liabilities column... so finding that many doesn't may not add credence to high-entropy theories like losing access to private keys, that secret ninjas are preventing them from spending coins, etc.